Priest-Educator on Disney Boardv Assesses Boundaries of Art, Spirit

The newest member of the Walt Disney Co. board of directors says his experience as a Jesuit priest has prepared him for working in “boundary situations” where religious values clash with popular culture, such as Disney’s current troubles with religious critics.

“I hope I would have some perspective as an educator and a theologian that would be helpful to the company,” said Father Leo J. O’Donovan, president of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

“A great university deals with questions of belief and unbelief, religion and secularity.”

In an interview, O’Donovan, a professor of theology, also suggested that the values of “secular Hollywood” are not much different from those of late 20th century culture in general, and that faith and art at their best defy easy definitions.

O’Donovan was named to the Disney board last week, not long after the traditionally family-oriented entertainment giant was threatened with a boycott by Southern Baptists and other religious conservatives for allegedly adopting “anti-family and anti-Christian” positions.

O’Donovan, 62, said it was “utterly accidental” that his election to the board was announced soon after the company was hit with protests by religious groups. He said he was asked to join the Disney board in February by Chairman Michael Eisner, who only last year had completed six years on the board of Georgetown, the nation’s oldest Catholic university.

“I was elected president of Georgetown in 1989 and Michael gave us some advice as we were celebrating our bicentennial,” O’Donovan said. The priest said he also knew Eisner’s son, Breck, who earned an undergraduate degree at the university in 1992.

Regarding the Southern Baptists’ principal criticism--Disney’s extension of insurance benefits to partners of gay employees--O’Donovan called that a humane policy. The Catholic Church regards homosexual acts as sins, but does not condemn homosexual orientation in itself and church leaders have defended some gay civil rights actions.

“It’s my understanding from Michael Eisner that the company was following industry standards and that it apparently applies to a relatively few number of people,” O’Donovan said.

“I think it’s inevitable for a large corporation in communications and entertainment to be subject to criticism and review,” said O’Donovan. “People of strong religious convictions have a perfect right to express their concerns but these are very delicate social issues and a company has a right to defend itself.”

Asked if he felt any trepidation about stepping into the secular world of Hollywood, O’Donovan said he isn’t so sure that Hollywood is any more secular than other areas of American life and that artistic expression of religion is already a rarity.

“You look at painting, sculpture, theater and the movies--we don’t have an easily identified corpus of religious art,” he said.

“But we do have a recurrence of religious themes [in popular entertainment] because the American people remain an intensely religious people--more so than most every European country,” he said.

“Religion will be no less influential, but it will clearly be exercised differently,” he said, because religion in America is in transition, becoming more diverse.

Drawing upon his youth as a movie buff on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, O’Donovan believes that films and television programs are not well understood by American society.

“The number of courses on film and television that would enable young people to be guided as adults doesn’t compare to the number of courses we give on Shakespeare,” said O’Donovan, whose resume is rich with academic posts and achievements, including a doctorate from the University of Munster in Germany.

Religion and art, such as movie-making, are comparable in some ways, he said--both tackle the difficult job of “saying the truest things about life.”